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Recordings

Howells’ ‘Coll. Reg.’ settings immediately set the benchmark for twentieth-century liturgical composition and led to the composer being besieged by requests from cathedrals and collegiate chapels for other such ‘custom-built’ settings. A generous ...» More

Hyperion’s Record of the Month gathers together sometimes austere, sometimes thrilling, always beautiful choral music by the original British composer Herbert Howells, seamlessly performed by Stephen Layton’s Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge.» More

Hail Queen, mother of mercy:
our life, our sweetness and our hope, hail.
To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve.
To thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, our advocate,
thine eyes of mercy towards us.
After this exile show unto us the blessed fruit
of your womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Salve regina is a very early work written in 1915 when Howells was still a student at the Royal College of Music. Stanford, Howells’s composition teacher, had sent him to Westminster Cathedral to hear Terry’s pioneering choir singing Renaissance church music. Howells’s response was instanta­neous and, starting with a Missa sine nomine later renamed Mass in the Dorian Mode, he continued to write a number of a cappella anthems for the choir. Salve regina was one of Four Anthems to the Blessed Virgin Mary which he wrote at this time. While showing clear signs of stylistic things to come, his debt to Palestrina and other composers of that era is obvious and moving.

Hail queen, mother of mercy:
our life, our sweetness and our hope, hail.
To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve.
To thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, our advocate,
thine eyes of mercy towards us.
After this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit
of your womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet virgin Mary.

Salve regina comes from the early period of Howells’ life, and is partly inspired by his student exposure to church music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of the most influential and important figures in the early twentieth-century revival of this music was Richard Terry, who transcribed, edited and performed much of this music with his choir at the newly built Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral. Stanford, Howells’ composition teacher at the Royal College of Music, was in the habit of recommending that his pupils go to Westminster to hear ‘Palestrina for tuppence’ (the cost of the bus fare). It was through Stanford and Terry that Howells’ Mass in the Dorian Mode, a student work of 1912, was sung at the cathedral—his very first professional performance. Terry was impressed with Howells’ work and requests for more liturgical pieces followed. Four Anthems to the Blessed Virgin Mary were composed in the space of one week and sung at Easter 1916 in the cathedral. The manuscripts are now lost and only two anthems survive (Regina caeli and Salve regina) in transcripts made by members of the cathedral choir.

The music of the Salve regina has moved away from the style of Palestrina that Howells was required to parody in the Mass, and the language is more personal without giving much indication of the complexity of Howells’ mature idiom. Perhaps he had been looking at the unaccompanied motets of Bruckner (or even Stanford), as well as Terry’s transcriptions of Tallis and Byrd. Writing in the Westminster Cathedral Chronicle in 1922, Terry described Howells’ Four Anthems as ‘… quite the finest by any modern Englishman’.